From: Barbara Lamar (barbaralamar@sanmarcos.net)
Date: Mon Jun 03 2002 - 11:51:19 MDT
I've been insanely busy these past few weeks and have had few moments for
reading and reflecting on list discussion. However, I owe a debt of
gratitude to Ayn Rand and so must take the time to make a couple of
comments.
Max More wrote:
> For the record, Rand was *not* a starting point for me -- I had already
> formed well-developed political views before I read Rand and had
> a fair bit
> of philosophy already. She *did* help put things together, though I never
> thought she had everything right.
Rand was not a starting point for me either. What she did for me was
VALIDATE the philosophy I'd lived by for years. Though I had friends to play
with when I was a kid, and was invited to all the cool parties in jr. high
and high school, and so forth, I was terribly lonely. The rules by which I
operated (which I'd mostly worked out for myself) were different from those
taught in church and school. The people I knew accepted what they were
taught; even the hippies, who were supposed to be free thinkers, didn't
really have anything new, just the same old stuff in a slightly different
package.
I first read Rand when I was in architecture school and someone told me I
should read THE FOUNTAINHEAD. I can still remember the night I read that
book. It was as though I'd been alone on a foreign planet all my life and
had suddenly discovered that there were others of my kind here after all.
I'd caught glimmers of Rand's style of thinking, for example in the novels
of Robert Heinlein; had experienced what I thought of as brightness (what
Rand calls a sense of life) in Victor Hugo's novels and O'Henry's short
stories. But I'd never seen it set forth in such clear terms and so
unequivocally. I stayed up all night reading that book and marveling at the
fact that *I wasn't alone*.
> As someone with a Ph.D. in philosophy, I will also say that many of her
> basic philosophical perspectives are superior to the vast majority of the
> drivel taught in universities -- drivel that is utterly useless in life.
Yes! When I was in college, I found the study of philosophy extremely
unsatisfactory. It seemed that in order to qualify as scholarly, one had not
only to be completely out of touch with the real world, but must also write
and speak in ways that were incomprehensible to anyone except perhaps
oneself (and I have my doubts as to whether some of those "philosophers"
made sense even to themselves).
What appealed to me about Rand's philosophy was that it was logical, and it
was meant to work in the real world. It was a form of technology, and like
most technological innovations, it had flaws, room for improvement. But
unlike the utterly useless drivel Max refers to, Rand's philosophy could be
tested in the real world and adjusted where it turned out to be wrong.
For people who've read THE FOUNTAINHEAD or ATLAS SHRUGGED and found the
characters unappealing I'd suggest WE THE LIVING, Rand's first published
novel. The characters are closer to "regular guys" than those of Rand's
later novels, and it provides an interesting glimpse of life in the early
Soviet Union.
It's interesting to note that I have not enjoyed being in the company of
members of Ayn Rand's cultlike following. The ones I've met were arrogant
without any real source of pride, utterly humorless, and narrow minded. They
seemed to have picked up on Rand's flaws and missed the good stuff.
Barbara Lamar
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